By Athena Papakosta

Islamic terrorism is again in the foreground and several European countries are already on alert for possible strikes against the background of the terrorist attack in Moscow.

France is the first to proactively raise the alert level to the maximum with the country’s president, Emmanuel Macron, a few 24 hours before revealing that the Afghan branch of the Islamic State, ISIS-K, has attempted, several times, to attack French soil.

In four months the Olympic Games are scheduled to start in Paris with 45,000 uniformed soldiers already announced to be on their feet.

In the last 24 hours, however, the memories of the attacks carried out in November 2015 by the Islamic State in the heart of the French capital have awakened and there are not a few who fear the arrival of a new cycle of deadly attacks. The reason was also the fact that there are dozens of French high schools, which, in recent days, received threats of attacks on a platform operated by teachers, students and parents with texts and images of beheadings.

There have already been two attacks in France this year. The first was recorded in the city of Arras last October0020 when a young radicalized Islamist attacked and killed a teacher with a knife, while in December a 26-year-old, known to the French authorities, attacked passers-by at the Eiffel Tower, killing a tourist.

At the same time, there is an uproar in Germany as the risk of Islamic terrorism remains intense in the country.

The country’s interior minister, Nancy Feiser, sounded the alarm about possible attacks when she emphasized in an interview that the biggest Islamist threat comes from the Islamic State in Khorasan.

In fact, a few days ago two of its members were arrested in Thuringia because they were planning to attack the Swedish parliament, while the security forces and the intelligence services remain on alert in view of the European Football Championship, Euro 2024, which is being held in the summer in the country, increasing and border controls.

Italy has already strengthened its security measures during the Easter holidays. As announced by the National Security Council, checks are increasing in places of greater concentration of people, such as popular tourist destinations, but also in “sensitive” targets.

Effervescence and concern is also recorded in Belgium. At the beginning of March, the authorities arrested four people who were planning a terrorist attack at a concert venue in Brussels. According to Le Soir, the conversations between the suspects revealed radicalization and closeness to the Islamic State.

At the same time, the Serbian capital has also been put on alert. Last weekend officers with machine guns patrolled the streets of Belgrade. According to the news agency, Associated Press, the president of Serbia, Aleksandar Vucic, said that plainclothes police officers will monitor sports venues as well as shopping malls.

And the question remains. Could the fear of possible strikes have returned, but is the threat of Islamist terrorism, for example, as visible as it was in the mid-2010s?

As the analyst and scholar of ISIS and of its Afghan arm ISIS-K, Antonio Giustozzi, notes in Politico, “people have been surprised because they thought ISIS was over” to add that in fact “it never left” but “remained an underground presence in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan”.

The only difference is that, this time, his would-be fighters are not Syrians, Iraqis or radicalized minorities from the West, he explains, but Muslims from Central Asia facing persecution in their own countries.

Therefore, “what’s going on?” asks the editor in the European edition of Politico to get a response from Giustozzi that ISIS “being defeated on the battlefield in Syria and Iraq and seeing its bank accounts in Turkey empty, it desperately wants to carry out attacks in order to prove that it remains relevant and manages, thus, to collect money through donations”.

In his… attempt, the London-based analyst explains, various attempts have been made in Europe over the last year and a half, which he considers could involve “Germany or the Netherlands but also France where the tensions between the Muslim community and governments are high.”